Discolored Hands
by Piccylo
Summary: In many ways, adults are polar opposites of the children they used to be. Naruto wakes up in a cave, and a strange woman with oddly colored hands is tending a fire nearby. She smiles mischievously and says that her name is Rin.


Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto. I'm not affiliated with Kishimoto Masashi, Shonen Jump, or Viz.

You have to have at least read past Kakashi's Gaiden to understand most of this anyway, so there are basically spoilers up to where the manga is currently.

'tis a **_ONE SHOT_**. Meaning that I shall not make any more chapters. Oh my!

* * *

Something was crackling and bubbling. In Naruto's dream, it was a pot of ramen cooking at the shop, which he watched with hungry eyes. But when his eyes opened to reality, he came to know that it was a fire a few meters away with a pot of some sort of medicinal mixture (from what he could smell) hanging over it. 

He was in a cave, and the fireplace was right outside the mouth, close enough for the person tending the pot to be under the cave's ceiling as they stirred. Naruto didn't recognize the hunched over silhouette or the scent that they gave off as being anyone he knew from the village. Instead of thinking immediately on his situation, he attempted to conjure up the last thing he could remember. "I was… fighting…" He garbled out.

The figure before the fire stiffened when Naruto's voice rang out in the otherwise quiet cave and turned. The darkness of night obscured a lot, but from what Naruto could tell from the red glow of the fire, this person was a woman. She stood and paced towards him. "You're awake already? Mmm… A normal person would be out for several days after all that…"

"Where am I? Who are you?" Naruto growled and pushed off the blankets that covered him to stand before the woman.

"Relax," she said, "You're safe here. Few people would be able to see through the genjutsu I've placed."

"Hey! You didn't answer my questions at all!" Naruto pulled out a kunai.

She chuckled, and she pulled some hair back out from her face, brushing over the purple markings on either cheek. "I didn't, did I? I guess I'm being quite rude, then. But I know _your_ name. You're Uzumaki Naruto. You've grown up a lot."

Naruto blinked and recoiled a bit. "Have we met before?"

She shook her head. "Not really _met_, per say. But I've seen you, and I was aware of who you were… _what_ you were… anyone that has lived in Konoha is aware of those things."

The cold words made him grit his teeth at her and get into stance again. She only gave another grin. "Don't let me upset you. I don't think of you as a monster like the other villagers have. Sensei would have frowned at me if I did."

Naruto disliked having someone that he didn't know speak as if she was an omniscient being. "Just tell me who you are!"

"Rin. My name is Rin. You had lost consciousness during battle… probably long before you actually stopped fighting. There was only one other person alive after you finally fell over, and I finished him off for you. If there were anyone else, they ran away." She laughed again. "I suggest that you go back and put on some more clothes before you catch a cold. It's chilly out tonight."

Naruto looked down and saw that he was only in an undershirt and boxers, and he quickly retreated back to the furs to look for something to put on. Rin laughed some more as he managed to find something to pull on and returned to his spot, back into stance and everything.

"Why did you take off my clothes in the first place, anyway? Are you some kind of pervert or something?"

"You were covered in blood, your _own_ blood," she said, her voice still sounding quite amused, "I washed you off when I healed your body, and then I cleaned and dried your clothes. You probably would have healed by yourself without medical intervention, but it's better for your life expectancy that more traditional methods are used."

"Are you a shinobi? A Leaf shinobi?"

"I suppose I am… or at least _was_."

"So then… you're a missing-nin?"

"In a nutshell." She diverted her attention and stirred the mixture a little. "So I'd appreciate it if you didn't tell anyone my name or that you met me when you meet back with your teammates."

_There's something **really** strange about her,_ Naruto thought, and he frowned.

There was a pause. "It's pretty dangerous, you know, to have that fox in you. You must have noticed that by now… And you've barely gotten half of your tails yet…"

He looked at her conspicuously. "How do you know so much?"

"Oh, through lots of means. Shinobi are good at intelligence gathering, so you should know them all. But here's a basic one: asking questions. Who is the Juunin that leads your team?"

"Hatake Kakashi."

"Really?" She grinned wide and laughed even more. "Kakashi! What a coincidence!"

"Do you know him?"

"You could say that." Rin calmed her laugh and showed a vicious, toothy smile. "What's he like now?"

Naruto pouted a lip and looked off to the side with a heave. "He's a jerk. A total bastard. He doesn't really care about anybody else half the time and mocks pretty much everything." Then he sighed. "But… he's a really good guy."

She grinned wider. "Good to know that his core attributes haven't changed at all. But tell me: What about his punctuality? And is he very upright or hard-ass about specific things? Like the ninja code?"

He cocked his head. "No… He doesn't seem to care a lot about the code, and he's casual about everything. And he's always late! And not just a little late, either… He'll be three or four hours late! Then he'll lie to us with a straight face and say that he got lost, or something like that."

"Mmm… he was that way when I left. Would you believe that he used to be really strict about punctuality and codes when he was a kid?"

"…No, not at all." Naruto's eyes widened. "Was he really?"

She looked up to the stars. "People _change_ a lot in order to stay the _same_ as they mature. In many ways, adults are polar opposites of the children they used to be, and in many ways, they haven't changed at all."

"Was he late at all?"

"Never. And he used to bug our teammate Obito whenever he came in a few minutes late."

"Teammate… Kakashi-sensei was your teammate?" He swallowed. "Does he know that you're a missing-nin?"

"Iie… He probably believes that I've died a while ago, along with the rest of the village."

"…Are you the one whose name is on the monument?"

"Monument…? Oh, no. That's Obito's name on that slab. Uchiha Obito. Kakashi still visits it?"

"All the time. Wait…_Uchiha_?"

"Mhm. Kakashi blamed himself for Obito's death… he probably still does." She stretched out. "But if Obito _had_ lived, there's a good chance he would have died when Itachi killed off the whole clan." She hummed a bit, as if reminiscing. "That was the last piece of town-wide gossip before I left."

During the next pause, Naruto looked over her again and tried to place where she might have been in Konoha. He couldn't recall anyone off the top of his head that looked like her. But then his eyes settled on her hands, when he noticed how discolored they were compared to the rest of her skin tone. And there seemed to be scars that separated the two different shades. "Why are your hands darker than the rest of your body?" Part of his mind remembered Orochimaru.

The wicked smile came back. "Because they're not mine."

"What do you mean? Were they someone else's?"

"Correct." She looked at him again. "The hands that I was born with were chopped off several years ago, right before I left Konoha. Kakashi and I have that in common… except he received his Sharingan from Obito as a _gift_. I simply killed a woman and stole her hands."

So much information in so few words made Naruto recoil again, this time combined with some anxiety from how coolly she added the last sentence. "How could you kill someone just to take their _hands_!"

"That's a very good question," she said, still smiling, "I asked the Akatsuki a similar question when they cut off my hands so that I wouldn't be able to escape as the kidnapped me. Not exactly the same question… since I didn't even mention my hands." Rin chuckled dryly.

Naruto felt sweat run down his face, and he wondered how she could laugh about such things. He gulped and sat down, taking a moment to go over everything he'd just learned. _Okay… this girl was Kakashi-sensei's teammate… she's a missing-nin… her hands were chopped off by the Akatsuki… Kakashi-sensei's eye came from another teammate named Uchiha Obito… and it's that guy's name that's on the monument…_

A few minutes later, he looked up at her with narrow eyes. "You really are a coward."

Rin raised a brow. "Oh? And why is that?"

"You ran from Konoha because you were afraid of the Akatsuki killing you, right? And you didn't have faith that the rest of the village wouldn't help you? That Kakashi-sensei wouldn't help you?"

She smiled. "I'm sure that the jerk would've helped me if he could. But he really was a jerk, as you said. Last time we saw each other, I punched him in the gut and told him to stay away from me. He obliged to that, and then I got myself kidnapped. Heh… egg on my face, huh?"

"But you still left after all that! Even if Kakashi-sensei's a jerk, you're still a coward! An untrusting coward!"

She simply stirred the mixture some more. "I suppose, then, that you would never leave Konoha?"

"I would never betray my friends!"

"But there's where the divide is, Uzumaki-kun!" She put some salt into the kettle and continued to stir. "Leaving your village means that you can _potentially_ betray your comrades. That's why missing-nin are so dangerous. But sometimes… it's better for the village to think that the shinobi had abandoned them or died than to have them live beside the people. This wasn't an overnight decision; I started thinking about it when my parents died… and it was accented when the demon fox came. But that incident proved to be the point where I couldn't deny it anymore."

Naruto got quiet. He didn't like his argument getting so quickly and calmly shot down.

Rin seemed to remember something, and she picked up a bag and began rummaging through it. She pulled out from it some rations and gave Naruto a portion. "Here. You must be hungry."

He greedily accepted it and scarfed it down, forgetting his anger quite readily. When he finished, he smiled at her. "Maybe you're not so bad after all. It sounded like you and Kakashi-sensei were friends."

"Friends? Well perhaps… but not until after Obito died. Before then, he didn't really act friendly to anyone. I _tried_ to be his friend, though, and I really respected him. He was a genius kid… a Juunin at a very young age. And since we had been on missions together for so long, it was hard not to gain some sort of feelings."

"He must have been really sad when you left, thinking that you died." He looked up in thought. "I wonder if he cried. That'd be really funny to see! I never saw Kakashi-sensei cry before. Hey! Did you ever see him cry?"

"I did."

"Was it funny? Like during a movie or something, and he got all sentimental?"

"No, not quite. You can ask him about it if you really want to know."

"He won't tell me anything! He'll probably make up some stupid lie! Wait…" Naruto's eyes narrowed, and he tilted his head in a way that made the shadows made from the fire on his face look especially distinct. "Did you ever see… Kakashi-sensei's… face?"

"Hmm? Oh yeah. Several times."

"WHAT! REALLY!" Naruto shot up with his eyes and mouth wide open. "What does he look like? Tell me!"

Rin put a finger on her lip and looked towards the treetops in thought. "Hmmm… naah."

His jaw dropped lower and he slumped forward. "Aww come on! Pleeeeeaaase? Does he have horse teeth? Or fish lips? Or a pointy mouth? Or—"

"Ah, calm down all ready!" She said, giggling at the boy's absurdity. "It's not like he's hiding a mass of scars and stitches underneath his mask."

"So what _does_ he look like?"

"Like a combination of his mother and father." She joked.

"That's not a good answer at all!"

"Oh, so it isn't…"

"Stop playing around!"

Morning came eventually, and Rin escorted Naruto to the outskirts of Konoha.

"This is as far as I go." She put up her hands, speaking as if the village was cursed grounds. "Take care, Uzumaki-kun. Tell Kakashi 'hi' for me."

He smiled back at her. "I thought you said that you didn't want me saying your name."

"So tell him 'hi' without saying my name. Is that so hard for the future Hokage?"

"Ehhh… I _guess_ not."

"And could you do me a favor?"

"What? Isn't telling Kakashi-sensei 'hi' enough?"

"It's not much; could you put a flower on the monument for me? And maybe some on the Third and Fourth Hokage's graves?"

Naruto grinned. "Sure!"

"Thanks." She waved and turned, soon disappearing.

Since there were some flowers near where he was, he decided to go ahead and do the favor. He picked three and went to the monument since it was closest. Kakashi was absent from that place, strangely enough, but he put the flower down and went to the graveyard. It didn't take long to find the Third and Forth's markers, and he left the flowers as he was requested.

Walking out of the graveyard, he spied a particular marker out of the corner of his eye. He approached it and read it… Sure enough, it was for the mysterious woman that he had met the night before.

A mischievous smirk drew across Naruto's face, and he ran off to his house, soon returning with some paints. _It's an inside joke, but who cares? **I'll** find it funny_. He quickly painted all over it with several different drawings… one of the fireplace and the kettle, some of the food that she gave him, etc. He also drew what he thought Kakashi's face looked like, and he blotted out several of the words with black paints, particularly anything that had to do with her "death".

"What are you doing, Naruto?" A voice said behind him. He peeked around his shoulder from his work and saw Kakashi.

"Yo, Kakashi-sensei." Naruto waved with the hand that held the paintbrush.

Kakashi sighed. "Ara ara… Naruto, you still can't be trusted. I thought you grew out of vandalizing sacred things."

"This person told me to tell you 'hi'."

The man blinked. "'This person'? Whom are you talking about?"

Naruto grinned and turned to continue his delinquency.

Kakashi's visible lid lowered. "Oi."

A few minutes later, Kakashi was marching out of the cemetery, holding Naruto beside him a foot off the ground _by his hair_.

"Ow ow ow ow!" Naruto complained, "It was a joke! You just don't get it!"

"I guess I have to think up a punishment for you…"

"Hey! Come on! Isn't dragging me around like this enough punishment!"

Gai heard the commotion from the market stand he was buying vegetables from and looked over. "What the…? Why is Kakashi pulling Naruto along like that?"

Jiraiya stopped mid-stride beside him. "Ah… Apparently he caught Naruto marking up Rin's grave marker."

"Really?" Gai laughed. "No wonder he seems so angry. They were engaged, after all."

* * *

Finished in one night! Nyarr!  
This was my first Naruto fic. So review!  



End file.
